1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a holding apparatus for at least one storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
An apparatus for the arrangement of a storage medium, for example a bulk store in the form of a hard disk, is known from the general prior art, in which the storage medium is introduced into a holder which is connected to a housing. Impacts, vibration and oscillations in this case generally do not disturb the storage medium provided that the hard disk head which is provided for reading from or writing to the storage medium is in a park position. As soon as the hard disk head is used for reading or writing, however, vibration, oscillations and/or impacts can lead to damage or to destruction of the storage medium. Impacts, oscillations and vibration may have different causes and may occur in very widely different applications. Normally, loads such as these can be expected in this case when the storage medium is used in land vehicles, watercraft or aircraft, in which information must be written to the storage medium or read from the storage medium while they are in motion.
In order to also make it possible to read data from the storage medium, or to write to it, in rugged environmental conditions such as these, correspondingly expensive special hard disks are known which can admittedly at least partially tolerate such impacts, oscillations and vibration, but which allow only low data transmission rates. One disadvantage in this case is that the simple and low-price hard disks which are available as standard products with an appropriate transmission rate on the market can thus not be used, so that the costs are increased by many times.
In particular, special hard disks such as these are also used when the storage medium is a flight data recorder on which the aim is to store large amounts of data from a digital camera during a photographic flight. This data may, for example, be image data, supplementary data relating to the images, such as mission data, system information, or general information for post-processing. The storage medium is in this case generally a bulk memory for “digital mapping camera”.
Every storage unit is mechanically secured in the aircraft and is electrically connected to all the necessary cables. Electrically and mechanically, every flight data recorder is an autonomous unit which is connected to a digital camera via an image data connection. Furthermore, a monitoring data input, a monitoring data output and a supply voltage input, a supply voltage output and a serial connection are provided for configuration.
The flight data recorder stores the image data during the flight. After landing, the flight data recorder is removed, and the image data is copied to a ground-based bulk memory. After the copying process and subsequent formatting, the flight data recorder is free for further photographic flights again.
However, one disadvantage in this case of the use of a storage medium as a flight data recorder is that the pressure surrounding the storage medium falls as the altitude increases, thus possibly resulting in a pressure which is below the minimum permissible pressure that is required for the storage medium to operate correctly.
Already known apparatuses for holding a storage medium are also subject to the problem that the amount of heat developed from the hard disk cannot reliably be dissipated.
The problems described with respect to use as a flight data recorder occur not only in this field but also in other fields in which the storage medium is used in a rugged environment. By way of example, applications may be mentioned in this context in the military field, in the industrial field or for in-field applications.